for anyone who experiences similar problem in future, i tried to install the ardour for 10.4 on a g3 mac, this g3 still uses the older version of ardour for 10.3 fine [ardour-0.99.3-panther], and cannot run the version for g4 (ardour-0.99.3-universal)

If you haven't already tried this, here is one possibility that fixed a similar problem I had with JackOsX after upgrading. It's from an article at: http://www.macworld.com/2006/02/secrets/marchmac911/index.php

"after installing an OS upgrade—say from OS X 10.4.1 to OS X 10.4.2—you should immediately dash to Apple’s Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities), select your startup drive from the list of drives at the left of the Disk Utility window, and click on Repair Permissions to put any errant file permissions back in line. I’ve found doing so to be an absolute necessity for this particular update."

This can actually fix a lot of weird error messages that creep up after upgrading. Hope it helps!